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Audacy Stock.... a new low!

D

Deleted User

closing price today, 9/13/22 FORTY FIVE CENTS A SHARE !!!!!

They already have a de-listing letter from the NYSE..... and there is no way they are getting that stock back over a dollar in our lifetime.

$64.94 a share on 12/31/1999

52 week high was $4.04

This is like watching Titanic, except I am rooting for the iceberg !
 
Keep in mind the entire stock market dropped by about 4% today based on continued inflation news.

Practically every stock dropped today, not just Audacy.

Inflation hurts the advertising marketplace, and Audacy's main revenue stream is advertising.

As I've pointed out before, they have several quick options: The first is a reverse stock split that will solve the immediate delisting problem. The second is to solidify their lending situation. The third is a sale to someone with deep pockets. Or the fourth is simply allow the stock to get delisted and deal with whatever consequences occur. One of these things is likely to happen.
 
Here's a novel thought:
Audacy could deliver two consecutive profitable quarters. They haven't done that since 2019. It would help investor confidence, and provide cash for the company to pay down some of its debts.

Anything else is just fiddling while Rome burns.
 
PTBoardOp94 said:
Audacy could deliver two consecutive profitable quarters. They haven't done that since 2019. It would help investor confidence, and provide cash for the company to pay down some of its debts.
Click to expand...

It's going to be hard in this economy to make a significant cut in debt without selling assets.

Even then, Cumulus sold off a quarter billion in property, and they still went bankrupt.

David Field needs a white knight.
 
A white knight would come in with a plan to make the company profitable.

If David Field can't do that then he needs to resign as CEO and hope the board can identify such a white knight.
 
PTBoardOp94 said:
A white knight would come in with a plan to make the company profitable.
Click to expand...
Pretty simplistic statement. What would such a plan look like? 'We're going to move the company toward a $2 per share increase by playing more 30 Seconds To Mars on our Alt-formatted stations.'
PTBoardOp94 said:
If David Field can't do that then he needs to resign as CEO and hope the board can identify such a white knight.
Click to expand...
And who would they hire? What else would a new CEO do these days for a mainly-pure radio play?
 
TheBigA said:
Not necessarily. Sirius was a penny stock in 2009. John Malone came in with a big wallet, and now the stock is trading at $6. Field needs someone like Malone.
Click to expand...
I agree, that would buy them some time. That said; there are fewer people with deep pockets that know radio who would invest in radio.
 
Their Senior Notes mature May 2027 ($460 million) and March 2029 ($540 million).

Their Secured Credit Facility (consisting of a $250 million revolver commitment, which as of June 30 was $135 million drawn + a $632 million Term Loan) matures May 2024 (Revolver) and November 2024 (Term Loan), I believe. The Secured Credit Facility is governed by a first lien net leverage ratio covenant. There is about four-tenths of a turn of unused headroom under that covenant at last report (3.6x actual result vs. a ceiling of 4.0x).

It is certainly possible the Secured Credit Facility lenders will take a kick-the-can-down-the-road approach and renew the facility for 12 months at a time - and temporarily reset the financial maintenance covenant as needed - so long as they are confident their loan exposure is adequately secured.

Secured Credit Facility lenders generally will not allow their facility to mature any closer than six months (and sometimes twelve months) prior to the scheduled maturity of unsecured notes. So, if the kick-the-can scenario were to play out, it is certainly possible Audacy would not have to face a day of financial reckoning until 2026.

The only way Audacy would face a day of financial reckoning much sooner is if they were to face a liquidity crisis, and that is not entirely out of the question. In the first half of 2022, the Company did increase Revolver utilization by over $37 million yet still saw cash on hand decline by $19 million! Not good! The Company has been spending a LOT of money on capex, presumably for the Audacy digital platform & streaming service. Net capex grew from $52 million 2020 to $125 million in 2021. Debt balances increased by about $110 million Y-o-Y. In the first half of 2022, the Company spent another $44 million in net capex.

Moody's seems to think (based on company guidance, presumably) that the capex spending spree for Audacy.com and all of its tentacles is largely finished, and that the company should be able to raise cash from divestment of non-core assets (real state, I suspect) to circumvent inflationary headwinds. We'll see if that thesis holds water as time passes.

The Company did issue an incremental $45 million of Senior Notes as recently as Q4'21 under an existing Indenture. That paper is priced at 6.500%, I believe. Those notes actually yielded proceeds at a slight premium over face value, believe it or not. (100.75% of par.) Audacy did not "pocket" the proceeds, though. The proceeds were used to prepay the Term Loan under the Secured Credit Facility instead, perhaps to give the Company additional breathing room under its first lien net leverage ratio covenant.

 
Kelly A said:
Pretty simplistic statement. What would such a plan look like? 'We're going to move the company toward a $2 per share increase by playing more 30 Seconds To Mars on our Alt-formatted stations.'


And who would they hire? What else would a new CEO do these days for a mainly-pure radio play?
Click to expand...
If that's the kind of plan you think they need, then let's suggest replacing David Field with any of the posters on here who have expressed doubt in Audacy's Alt strategy. :rolleyes:

In reality, they probably need someone in the mold of Mary Berner. Someone with no attachment to the business who can credibly look at the operation from the top down and find departments and divisions which are not profitable and work to fix them, or axe them.

TheBigA said:
Not necessarily. Sirius was a penny stock in 2009. John Malone came in with a big wallet, and now the stock is trading at $6. Field needs someone like Malone.
Click to expand...
Malone didn't just come in with a pile of cash - his new management made Sirius profitable. I don't recall what strategies they undertook to make it so, but SiriusXM is on track to make $1 billion in profit this year.
 
A credit downgrade from Moody's is probably the last thing Audacy needed.

Read through their report. There's no way a "white knight" is buying all that debt.
 
PTBoardOp94 said:
Here's a novel thought:
Audacy could deliver two consecutive profitable quarters. They haven't done that since 2019. It would help investor confidence, and provide cash for the company to pay down some of its debts.

Anything else is just fiddling while Rome burns.
Click to expand...
Or in David Field's case, listening to alt.
 
PTBoardOp94 said:
If that's the kind of plan you think they need, then let's suggest replacing David Field with any of the posters on here who have expressed doubt in Audacy's Alt strategy.
Click to expand...
It was a reference to the equally simplistic programming strategies some of the armchair-programming-Einstein's on this site would probably suggest as an option to right the ship.
PTBoardOp94 said:
In reality, they probably need someone in the mold of Mary Berner. Someone with no attachment to the business who can credibly look at the operation from the top down and find departments and divisions which are not profitable and work to fix them, or axe them.
Click to expand...
For as simple sounding as you make it, the Audacy Board isn't in a voting position to get rid of David, because the Fields' own too many of the voting shares:
"Audacy Stock Ownership FAQ Audacy (NYSE: AUD) is owned by 50.99% institutional shareholders, 25.19% Audacy insiders, and 23.83% retail investors. Joseph M. Field is the largest individual Audacy shareholder, owning 26.93M shares representing 18.53% of the company."
PTBoardOp94 said:
Malone didn't just come in with a pile of cash - his new management made Sirius profitable. I don't recall what strategies they undertook to make it so, but SiriusXM is on track to make $1 billion in profit this year.
Click to expand...
Pretty sure that number represents gross profit, not net. And with debt, I'll bet SXM basically covers it's nut, but that's about it. But unlike Audacy; SXM has been working on diversification away from just being satellite-delivered radio for several years. Audacy is seriously late to that party, and outside investors have already moved on from investing in radio trying to reinvent itself. One could say that ship has sailed.
 
SXM Holdings reported $1.3B in Net Income in 2021. I've not yet looked at the financials in detail to see how much of that, if any, was due to extraordinary items.

Even in 2020, they showed about $130 million in their bottom line after taking something like an $800 million non-cash impairment charge. In 2019, net income was $914 million.

I cannot recall which year had a failed satellite launch, which in turn impinged earnings.

SXM generally produces decent free cash flow, but on a per share basis, the number may seem underwhelming. Still a much better cash-on-cash return than some traditional radio conglomerates can tout.
 
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By the way, SXM has about 3.9 billion (!!!) shares of common stock outstanding. Issuing all those shares was a much better strategy than levering the balance sheet with a ton of debt.

Their market cap is $23.4 billion, and enterprise value is obviously an even higher number.
 
With a paid video streaming service like NFLX taking a major hit in the stock market this year (SXM is akin to paid audio streaming, except content is delivered by way of satellite for most listening sessions), and with relatively few new car purchases taking place, I'm not surprised SXM is trading near a 52 week low.
 
CTListener said:
Likely because its main product continues to be the dreaded r-word.
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The whole market hit a medium range low yesterday on news of further inflation and uncertainty on what more the Fed can do. They issues were the hardest hit. this is a case of the whole sector SXM is in being hard hit, from Apple and AMD on down.
 
CTListener said:
Likely because its main product continues to be the dreaded r-word.
Click to expand...
It is off in about the same percentages as Intel and AMD and the tech sector in general. The whole market is off due to the 40-year-record-high inflation.
 
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